Boon holds the position of Chief Technology Officer at Oxford SimCell Ltd. (OSC) and he will serve as the Scientific Lead for this project. As one of the inventors of the SimCell technology, Boon has spent the past six years working on numerous SimCell projects throughout his PhD and at OSC. At OSC, he is responsible for leading the discovery and pre-clinical development of all vaccine pipelines in the company's portfolio. Boon has also successfully developed multiple SimCell vaccine candidates from bacteria such as Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Shigella sonnei and Salmonella typhimurium for different indications.
Boon's research interests lie in identifying clinically relevant bacteria, both gram positive and gram negative, and converting them into SimCells (genome-free bacterial cells) to be used as inactivated whole-bacteria vaccines.
Currently, Boon is working on converting Aeromonas hydrophilla into SimCells. A. hydrophilla is the causative agent of motile Aeromonas septicaemia (MAS) in cultured fish and OSC is designing a bio-process to produce A. hydrophila SimCells at lab-scale as well as a lyophilization method to achieve better stability at room temperature.